2026-11-06 17:50 UTC
Replies (8)
-
@Broadfern@lemmy.world 2026-11-06 17:59
Assigned sex at birth also includes a lot of how a person is socialized (not just from family but society at large) during their formative years. So it is, in a sense, assigning a person a gender as well. Also gender and sex are frequently conflated in the English language by most people who choose not to think more critically or ask questions on these topics.
-
@rockSlayer@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-11-06 18:31
Sex is a binary in the same sense that there is a gender binary. Intersex people exist, and get socialized too. AGAB is a broad category to include people of all sexes and genders
-
@lugal@sopuli.xyz 2026-11-06 19:31
My understanding is that sex and gender aren’t as clear cut as people used to think so a growing number of people use sex and gender interchangeably by referring to it as “sex/gender” or “gender” as a catch all term. Think about it that way: Sex is physical, like organs, hormones, height, muscle mass, … and gender is social like behavior, norms, expectations. So telling boys to eat up to they get tall and strong and letting them do a lot of sports while telling girls not to get fat and simultaneously to do more creative stuff that isn’t too active is gender. But when boys in fact grow tall and muscular, that’s testosterone and therefore sex and has nothing to do with gender. The argument is that gender and sex are too multifaceted and too intertwined to meaningful separate them. That’s at least one take away a had from reading “Who’s Afraid Of Gender” by Judith Butler. It’s not too long and an easy read. Highly recommend.
-
@Th4tGuyII@fedia.io 2026-11-06 19:49
Yeah, from working in a medical field - your sex can have a huge effect on the way your body interacts with certain medicines/drugs - and as such I find the trend of conflating Gender and Sex to be rather dangerous. And it's not just people that started doing it either. I've worked on multiple studies where data entry points have asked for Gender when they very much meant Sex. Again dangerous, because the answer to both is only the same for cis identifying people - and you really don't want to get that wrong. What you do with your Gender is nobody's business but your own. Express yourself however you please - but if a medical professional is asking your assigned sex at birth, consider they may be doing so to keep you safe. (For the record I'm not stating either as a binary, I'm aware intersex people exist, and do believe more should be done to accommodate them in medical settings which mostly currently act like they don't exist) Edit: Somehow the end of my second to last paragraph got replaced by a fullstop. Weird stuff
-
@LavaPlanet@sh.itjust.works 2026-11-06 20:56
Gender and sex used to mean the same thing, and it’s not like massive amounts of people are out there raising their kids non binary until the kids can choose for themselves, so whatever sex someone is assigned denotes the gender they’ve been assigned too.
-
@wpb@lemmy.world 2026-11-07 06:35
I think the key is in the word “assigned”. They don’t grab a penis from the penis bin and assign it to you, they assign a gender to you. They determine the sex, and assign the gender.
-
@riwo@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2026-11-07 07:39
they assing one a gender at birth based on ones anatomy. they assign a sex at birth based on the anatomy. both are social constructs and i believe among the two gender is the more accepted one by progressives, as it is the one that people actually positively associate with and which we all agree we can pick for ourselves. yes, a gender assigned at birth is something we were forced into but we can change it. sex on the other hand is more commonly used as a weapon against us. ofc ones anatomy is seperate from ones gender (altho it can be part of it), but sex is anatomy gendered. but unlike gender, the person whose anatomy it is, does not get to decide their sex. at the end of the day it’s gender forced onto people from outside in a way they can’t change (or only by changing their bodies). it’s violent. now we could try to work towards degendering sex, but i believe this is incredibly hard since words such as male and female are used interchangably with man and woman, and well for example most male sexed people are also men. so i believe it makes more sense to desex our bodies, and use male and female uniquely for gender (or not at all) if we desex bodies of course, then we might need other ways to talk about certain common clusterings of attributes, and the solution for that is to just say what’s there. idk if there are better words for this but it can be things like “testosterone dominant system” “estrogen dominant system”, “having an uterus” “having a prostate”, “having breasts” “having a weight lighter than x”… this has the advantage of automatically accounting much better for human diversity than the strict sex system ever could :3 using agab instead of asab is another defocusing of sex then.
-
@Quokka@quokk.au 2026-11-07 00:56
In Australia a lot of healthcare and places are now starting to use ASAB to get around respecting your gender. I absolutely loathe ASAB, because it’s even more bioessentialist than AGAB. I much prefer the organ inventory approach, which also helps cis people too, e.x. hysterectemies.